Graham Swift | The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/grahamswift
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Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift – digestedhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/28/mothering-sunday-by-graham-swift-digested
<p>John Crace reduces Swift’s story of stains, secret love and pork pies to 800 words</p><p>Once upon a time. In her later years when she was a famous novelist, Jane Fairchild would have been happy to start a book that way, confident her readers would have understood the sophistication she brought to the cliched opening line. But this was 30 March 1924. Mothering Sunday. Jane was not yet a writer and her story was being told by Graham, who was not so certain of his readership. Once upon a time. That was better. A second usage surely could not be mistaken as anything but deliberate.</p><p>While Graham was struggling over his opening paragraph (don’t panic Graham, he told himself, a novel need not be a doorstop – even in 1924, the novella was quite acceptable) Jane lay naked on the bed playing with her cunt. She had yet to read DH Lawrence, for her self-improvement was but in its infancy. Indeed Mr Lawrence had yet to write <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/29/my-highlight-lady-chatterleys-lover-dh-lawrence-bbc-adaptation">Lady Chatterley’s Lover</a>, but when he did get round to doing so, and she had got round to reading it, she would not have been afraid of using such a word.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/28/mothering-sunday-by-graham-swift-digested">Continue reading...</a>BooksGraham SwiftCultureFictionSun, 28 Feb 2016 17:00:30 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/28/mothering-sunday-by-graham-swift-digestedIllustration: Matt BleaseIllustration: Matt BleaseJohn Crace2016-02-28T17:00:30ZBook reviews roundup: Mothering Sunday; The Button Box; City of Thornshttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/26/critical-eye-book-reviews-roundup
<p>What the critics thought of Mothering Sunday by Graham Swfit, The Button Box by Lynn Knight and City of Thorns Ben Rawlence</p><p>Graham Swift, whose profile had dipped since his Booker-winning <a href="https://bookshop.theguardian.com/last-orders-2.html" title=""><em>Last Orders</em></a> two decades ago, was agreed to be back on top form with what <strong>John Sutherland</strong> in the Times described as&nbsp;“an erotic novelette”. <a href="https://bookshop.theguardian.com/catalog/product/view/id/366889/s/mothering-sunday//?utm_source=editoriallink&amp;utm_medium=merch&amp;utm_campaign=article" title=""><em>Mothering Sunday</em></a> is a compact tale of an upstairs-downstairs affair, a&nbsp;moment of tragedy and a housemaid’s intellectual awakening – is set in 1924 on the&nbsp;one day of the year that female servants were guaranteed a&nbsp;holiday. Sutherland tipped this “antidote to the cloying sentimentalities of <em>Downton Abbey</em>” for the Man Booker list, but pointed out that, at 132 pages, it could reignite the debate about length that raged when Ian McEwan’s novella <a href="https://bookshop.theguardian.com/on-chesil-beach.html" title=""><em>On&nbsp;Chesil Beach</em></a> made the 2007 shortlist. (Indeed, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/mothering-sunday-by-graham-swift-book-review-a-haunting-tale-of-life-and-lust-a6867591.html" title=""><strong>James Runcie</strong> in the Independent</a> described the book as “<em>On Chesil Beach</em>, only with better sex”.) <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/21/graham-swift-latest-novel-mothering-sunday-review" title=""><strong>Hannah Beckerman</strong> in the Observer</a> called the book “powerful, philosophical and exquisitely observed”; in one&nbsp;sense it&nbsp;is “a feminist story – the orphan put into service at 14 who finds her voice, her independence and a&nbsp;successful profession. But it is also a&nbsp;fairy story, a story of poverty, of serendipity, of ambition and of transformation.” “The archly modulated, precise prose (a hybrid of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/sep/24/classics.sebastianfaulks" title="">Henry Green</a> and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/kazuoishiguro" title="">Kazuo Ishiguro</a>) is a glory to read,” confirmed <a href="http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/books/mothering-sunday-a-romance-by-graham-swift-review-a3178561.html" title=""><strong>Ian Thomson</strong> in the Evening Standard</a>. “Now 66, Swift is a writer at the very top of his game.”</p><p>Lynn Knight’s <a href="https://bookshop.theguardian.com/catalog/product/view/id/372452/s/the-button-box//?utm_source=editoriallink&amp;utm_medium=merch&amp;utm_campaign=article" title=""><em>The Button Box</em></a> relates history through haberdashery, as Knight uses a collection of buttons and scraps inherited from her grandmother as a starting point to explore “the fabric, literal and metaphorical, of the women who wore them. It’s a&nbsp;brilliant notion,” wrote <strong>Daisy Goodwin</strong> in the Sunday Times, while&nbsp;<strong>Jane Shilling</strong> in the&nbsp;Daily Mail admired a “fascinating social history” that illustrates Virginia Woolf’s dictum that clothes “change our view&nbsp;of the world and the world’s view of us”. <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/lynn-knight-the-button-box-lifting-the-lid-on-women-s-lives-the-past-is-all-buttoned-up-book-review-a6884421.html" title=""><strong>Shirley Whiteside</strong> in the&nbsp;Independent on Sunday</a> called it&nbsp;“an important book, tracing the enormous changes in women’s lives through the humblest of fastenings”. But <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/14/the-button-box-lynn-knight-review-lifting-the-lid-on-womens-lives" title=""><strong>Rachel Cooke</strong> in the Observer</a> found the book’s “dribs and drabs of history, personal and garnered” made it “a&nbsp;one-thing-after-another kind of a&nbsp;book: delightful in places and lovely to dip into, but on the wearying side if read from start to finish”.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/26/critical-eye-book-reviews-roundup">Continue reading...</a>FictionGraham SwiftBooksCultureFri, 26 Feb 2016 18:00:17 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/26/critical-eye-book-reviews-roundupPhotograph: Linda Nylind for the GuardianPhotograph: Linda Nylind for the GuardianGuardian Staff2016-02-26T18:00:17ZMothering Sunday by Graham Swift review – exquisitely told, deeply affectinghttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/21/graham-swift-latest-novel-mothering-sunday-review
<p>Swift’s latest novel, about a housemaid whose life is transformed, is perhaps his best book yet</p><p>“Once upon a time…” begins <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/05/graham-swift-interview-when-youre-reading-youre-on-a-little-island" title="">Graham Swift</a>’s profoundly moving new novel, immediately transporting the reader into a narrative that’s as much about our imperative for storytelling as it is about the life of its&nbsp;protagonist.</p><p>Jane Fairchild is 22 and works as a maid for the Niven family at their home, Beechwood, in Berkshire. The story takes place on one day, 30 March 1924 – Mothering Sunday – when staff are free to visit their parents. But Jane has no parents: she was abandoned on the steps of an orphanage at birth in 1901 and “What was a maid to do with her time, released for the day on <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/she-said/2014/mar/28/why-bother-with-mothers-day-when-were-so-half-hearted-about-it" title="">Mothering Sunday</a>, when she had no home to go to?”</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/05/graham-swift-interview-when-youre-reading-youre-on-a-little-island">Graham Swift: 'When you're reading a book you're&nbsp;on a little island'</a> </p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/03/england-other-stories-review-graham-swift-affectionate-chronicle-everyday-lives">England and Other Stories review – Graham Swift's affectionate chronicle of everyday lives</a> </p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/21/graham-swift-latest-novel-mothering-sunday-review">Continue reading...</a>Graham SwiftFictionBooksCultureSun, 21 Feb 2016 10:30:22 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/21/graham-swift-latest-novel-mothering-sunday-reviewPhotograph: Murdo Macleod for the GuardianPhotograph: Murdo Macleod for the GuardianHannah Beckerman2016-02-21T10:30:22ZMothering Sunday: A Romance by Graham Swift review – a perfect small tragedyhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/20/mothering-sunday-a-romance-by-graham-swift-review
A last moment of intimacy between English maidservant and heir is at the heart of this masterful novella<p>On Mothering Sunday, 1924, with one war not long past and a second waiting over the horizon, young Jane Fairchild – foundling, maid to the Niven household in the green home counties, and the narrator and protagonist of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/grahamswift" title="">Graham Swift</a>’s enchanted novella – has no mother to&nbsp;go to. Instead she has “her simple liberty”, along with a book and half a crown in her pocket bestowed by a kindly employer who, his sons dead in France and his domestic staff reduced, is inclined to be indulgent to&nbsp;her youth.</p><p>The Nivens and their fellow servant-owning tribes, the Sheringhams and the Hobdays, have two children left between them in the aftermath of the&nbsp;first world war, and on this day a “jamboree” is planned, an excursion to&nbsp;Henley to celebrate the surviving pair’s impending marriage. Whether or&nbsp;not the young couple – Paul Sheringham and Emma Hobday – will be included is a subject of close and secret interest to Jane, because for almost seven years she has – joyfully and without shame, if not openly – been Paul Sheringham’s lover.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/20/mothering-sunday-a-romance-by-graham-swift-review">Continue reading...</a>FictionBooksCultureGraham SwiftSat, 20 Feb 2016 07:30:42 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/20/mothering-sunday-a-romance-by-graham-swift-reviewPhotograph: Murdo Macleod for the GuardianPhotograph: Murdo Macleod for the GuardianChristobel Kent2016-02-20T07:30:42ZGraham Swift: 'As human beings we're all short-story enthusiasts'https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/07/graham-swift-short-stories-paperback-writer
<p>The author of England and Other Stories, returning to short fiction after many years writing only novels, wonders why the two forms are considered so radically distinct <br></p><p>It’s being said that short stories are making a comeback. Though I have to confess to a 30-year lapse from writing them, I don’t think the short story as a form ever went away. It has its solid tradition, its classic exponents, just as the novel does. In fact, long before there were things called novels there were short stories – the tales we all tell each other. As human beings we’re all short-story enthusiasts. It’s the novel that’s the oddity.<br></p><p> What there has been in recent times is a somewhat wilful separation of the two forms, resulting in the sense of a contest. Because one is “big” and the other “small” the short story has almost inevitably come off worse. This has led to the notion that, as publishing propositions, stories aren’t as viable as novels – a prejudice so ingrained that it’s become self-fulfilling.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/07/graham-swift-short-stories-paperback-writer">Continue reading...</a>Short storiesBooksFictionGraham SwiftCultureTue, 07 Jul 2015 14:00:03 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/07/graham-swift-short-stories-paperback-writerPhotograph: Murdo Macleod for the GuardianPhotograph: Murdo Macleod for the GuardianGraham Swift2015-07-07T14:00:03ZThe 100 best novels: No 55 – As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/06/100-best-novels-as-i-lay-dying-william-faulkner
The influence of William Faulkner’s immersive tale of raw Mississippi rural life can be felt to this day<p>This is the first, and probably the most popular, of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County stories, a short, dark and compelling novel set in what he called “my apocryphal county”, a fictional rendering of Lafayette County in his native Mississippi. It was his ambition, he said, after the comparative failure of <em>The Sound and the Fury</em>, “deliberately to write a tour de force”. Apart from Mark Twain (<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/24/100-best-novels-huckleberry-finn-twain" title="">No 23 in this series</a>), no other American writer before Faulkner had ever immersed his readers so completely in the vernacular language and culture of a society that was, and perhaps still is, so deeply foreign to mainstream American experience.</p><p>The death and burial of a southern matriarch, Addie Bundren, is told from some 15 viewpoints, including that of the dying woman herself. The Bundren family’s demanding stream-of-consciousness narrative (Faulkner was a modernist pioneer) is intercut with the voices of the local doctor and preacher, together with neighbours and friends. From the first line, the reader is pitched into the deep south: “Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file… anyone watching us from the cotton-house can see Jewel’s frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own.” Welcome to a brutal, backwoods community of impoverished cotton farmers in 1920s Mississippi.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/06/100-best-novels-as-i-lay-dying-william-faulkner">Continue reading...</a>William FaulknerFictionErnest HemingwayF Scott FitzgeraldGraham SwiftRichard FordPeter CareyBooksCultureMon, 06 Oct 2014 04:45:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/06/100-best-novels-as-i-lay-dying-william-faulknerPhotograph: Alfred Eriss/Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesWilliam Faulkner: 'incomparably more contemporary than Fitzgerald and Hemingway'. Photograph: Alfred Eriss/Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesPhotograph: Alfred Eriss/Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesWilliam Faulkner: 'incomparably more contemporary than Fitzgerald and Hemingway'. Photograph: Alfred Eriss/Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesRobert McCrum2014-10-06T04:45:00ZEngland and Other Stories review – Graham Swift's affectionate chronicle of everyday liveshttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/03/england-other-stories-review-graham-swift-affectionate-chronicle-everyday-lives
Legends are felled, opportunities missed and secrets laid bare in Graham Swift's clever new story collection<p>In the most arresting story in this new collection, a young boy offers a tin of Ajax to the next-door neighbour, who's come looking for a helping hand unblocking his drains. "Isn't it a sad thing, Jimmy," the man laments, "that one of the great heroes of the Greek myths, one of the most glorious of those who fought in the Trojan war, should be reduced to being a tin of scouring powder?"</p><p>Reduction in all its forms is something of a theme in Graham Swift's collection, both in form and content. Over 25 stories he reduces his characters' lives to these snapshots; a freeze-frame suspended image of a moment that distils the essence of the life in question, reduces it to something small and, to an unknowing observer, seemingly inconsequential.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/03/england-other-stories-review-graham-swift-affectionate-chronicle-everyday-lives">Continue reading...</a>Short storiesFictionGraham SwiftBooksCultureSun, 03 Aug 2014 09:30:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/03/england-other-stories-review-graham-swift-affectionate-chronicle-everyday-livesPhotograph: Karen RobinsonGraham Swift's protagonists are England's everymen and women. Photograph: Karen RobinsonPhotograph: Karen RobinsonGraham Swift's protagonists are England's everymen and women. Photograph: Karen RobinsonLucy Scholes2014-08-03T09:30:00ZEngland & Other Stories by Graham Swift – all human life is herehttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/16/england-other-stories-graham-swift-review-short-story-collection
A sharp, beautiful collection that investigates life's milestones and the meaning of Englishness<p>Graham Swift is a watcher, a listener, the recorder of our days. "People are life," one of his characters suggests, but life is also the social structures that provide context for the living of it. The short stories in his third collection often focus, therefore, on occasions. Weddings and divorces, job interviews and funerals, all the puzzled collisions with the bureaucratic infrastructure, all the usual points of connection between the&nbsp;individual and the culture: if they aren't providing a direct context, they're never very far in the background.</p><p>In "The Best Days", people attend a&nbsp;funeral because it's something to do&nbsp;when you're unemployed. Man or woman, they're all wearing their interview suits. "Everyone was freshly aware of being alive in the world," a young man called Sean observes, "and not dead in it and that they'd been involved in something dutiful but oddly animating." He remembers visiting the house of a girl he fancied when they were both still at school and being efficiently and coldly seduced by her mother. The loss of virginity is a cultural event too.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/16/england-other-stories-graham-swift-review-short-story-collection">Continue reading...</a>Graham SwiftShort storiesFictionBooksCultureWed, 16 Jul 2014 09:00:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/16/england-other-stories-graham-swift-review-short-story-collectionPhotograph: Clifford Harper/Agraphia.co.uk'Something big's coming,' muse the window cleaners. Illustration: Clifford Harper/Agraphia.co.ukPhotograph: Clifford Harper/Agraphia.co.uk'Something big's coming,' muse the window cleaners. Illustration: Clifford Harper/Agraphia.co.ukM John Harrison2014-07-16T09:00:00ZGraham Swift: 'When you're reading a book you're on a little island'https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/05/graham-swift-interview-when-youre-reading-youre-on-a-little-island
The author of <em>Waterland</em> and <em>Last Orders</em> tells Susanna Rustin how 'joyful' he feels to be writing short stories<p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/grahamswift" title="">Graham Swift</a>'s new collection of short stories – his first for more than 30 years – is called <a href="http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9781471137402" title=""><em>England and Other Stories</em></a>, and "England" is the name of the last&nbsp;one in the book. In it a coastguard, Ken, driving across <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2013/aug/23/exmoor-national-park-rangers-guide" title="">Exmoor</a> at 5am, stops to help the driver of a beaten-up BMW stuck in a gully at the side of the road. The stranger turns out to be an African-Caribbean comedian from West Yorkshire, stranded on his way to a booking in Ilfracombe on the north Devon coast, and the story turns on Ken's perception of him.</p><p>Where is he from? Could he be dangerous? Is he lying when he says he&nbsp;swerved to avoid a deer? Is he even real? "In time even Johnny Dewhurst, like that questionable deer, might start to seem like a hallucination," Ken tells himself as he drives off into the dawn, having resolved to tell nobody about the encounter and to decline an invitation to that night's show for fear&nbsp;of becoming part of the routine ("Have you heard the one about the lost coastguard?").</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/05/graham-swift-interview-when-youre-reading-youre-on-a-little-island">Continue reading...</a>Graham SwiftFictionShort storiesBooksCultureSat, 05 Jul 2014 08:00:39 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/05/graham-swift-interview-when-youre-reading-youre-on-a-little-islandPhotograph: Graham Turner/Guardian'I often write about the moments of crisis in people’s life where a space opens up' … Graham Swift. Photograph: Graham Turner for the GuardianPhotograph: Graham Turner/Guardian'I often write about the moments of crisis in people’s life where a space opens up' … Graham Swift. Photograph: Graham Turner for the GuardianSusanna Rustin2014-07-05T08:00:39ZAlex Clark's best young British novelistshttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/17/best-young-british-novelists-2013-alex-clark
Ahead of Granta's 2013 list, a former Granta editor and veteran of the 2003 judging panel picks her 20 favourites<p>Bah. Lists: can't live with them, can't live without them (you can, actually, but it would probably be duller). I've already done my shift with Granta in choosing the Best of Young British, so, judges, please take the following suggestions with a pinch of salt. Apart from the 20 names below, Zadie Smith may well appear again (Adam Mars-Jones, Kazuo Ishiguro and AL Kennedy are, to date, the three writers to be featured in two lists), as may Adam Thirlwell, the only other of last time's bunch not to have grown too old. Other than that, I've one apology to make and that is to Jon McGregor (first on my list below). It wouldn't be quite true to say his omission last time has been bothering me for a decade but I'm glad to have said it now.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/17/best-young-british-novelists-2013-alex-clark">Continue reading...</a>GrantaFictionBooksGwendoline RileyHilary MantelJoe DunthorneNed BeaumanStephen KelmanAdam FouldsHelen OyeyemiRoss RaisinMartin AmisJulian BarnesKazuo IshiguroGraham SwiftJonathan FranzenIan McEwanPat BarkerAL KennedyAS ByattMonica AliJennifer EganSun, 17 Mar 2013 00:02:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/17/best-young-british-novelists-2013-alex-clarkPhotograph: PRJon McGregor: 'an expert dissector of everyday life'.Photograph: PRJon McGregor: 'an expert dissector of everyday life'.Alex Clark2013-03-17T00:02:00ZBooker club: Last Orders by Graham Swifthttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/24/booker-club-graham-swift-last-orders
Continuing his occasional series on rereading the Booker prize winners, Sam Jordison considers the 1996 champion, Last Orders, and finds that while the debate about Swift's debt to Faulkner is absurd, the novel's flawed vernacular makes it a weak winner<p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/data/book/fiction/9780330518222/last-orders" title="">Last Orders</a>, a quiet, delicate and gently moving book about four friends disposing of another friend's ashes, has had a strange afterlife as one of the Man Booker prize's most controversial winners.</p><p>The trouble started six months after the book won the award, when an academic called John Frow wrote in the <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;ved=0CHAQFjAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.australianbookreview.com.au%2F&amp;ei=2GUOUKH2EsKm0AW9kYHwDg&amp;usg=AFQjCNF1BBwi5y9_37fn9fU5XraSzQmLjQ" title="">Australian Review of Books</a> that he saw marked similarities between Swift's novel and William Faulkner's deep south story about the disposal of a corpse, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/data/book/literary-criticism/9780099479314/as-i-lay-dying" title="">As I Lay Dying</a>:</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/24/booker-club-graham-swift-last-orders">Continue reading...</a>Graham SwiftBooker prizeFictionAwards and prizesBooksCultureTue, 24 Jul 2012 11:28:36 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/24/booker-club-graham-swift-last-ordersPhotograph: Michael Stephens/PAAwright guv … Graham Swift celebrates his 1996 Booker prize win for Last Orders. But did Bermondsey butchers share his joy? Photograph: Michael Stephens/PAPhotograph: Michael Stephens/PAAwright guv … Graham Swift celebrates his 1996 Booker prize win for Last Orders. But did Bermondsey butchers share his joy? Photograph: Michael Stephens/PASam Jordison2012-07-24T11:28:36ZJohn Mullan's 10 of the best: horse raceshttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/john-mullan-ten-best-horse-races
From Hyde Park to Epsom, it's a close-run thing<p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/data/book/stage/9780413166005/hyde-park" title=""><strong><em>Hyde Park</em></strong></a><strong> by James Shirley</strong><br>Shirley's Caroline comedy is set mainly in Hyde Park, where disputing lovers sport while the fashionable set promenade and gamble. Among the games taking place are horse races, the favourite diversion of the belles and beaux. When the play was performed in the Restoration era it featured real horses.</p><p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/data/book/classics/9781847491367/mansfield-park" title=""><strong><em>Mansfield Park</em></strong></a><strong> by Jane Austen</strong><br>By frittering money on the horses, Tom Bertram has already lost his brother his "living" as a vicar (his father has to sell it to pay the debts). He tries to persuade Mary Crawford to go to "the races" with him and is duly punished when he goes off to Newmarket, "where a neglected fall and a good deal of drinking had brought on a fever". He nearly dies.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/john-mullan-ten-best-horse-races">Continue reading...</a>BooksCultureJane AustenLeo TolstoyDH LawrenceErnest HemingwayDick FrancisHoward BrentonGraham SwiftPeter CareyFri, 15 Jun 2012 21:55:01 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/john-mullan-ten-best-horse-racesPhotograph: Alan Crowhurst/Getty ImagesRacing at Newmarket. Photograph: Alan Crowhurst/Getty ImagesPhotograph: Alan Crowhurst/Getty ImagesRacing at Newmarket. Photograph: Alan Crowhurst/Getty ImagesJohn Mullan2012-06-15T21:55:01ZGuardian Books podcast: Writers and the British landscapehttps://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2012/may/11/writers-landscape-british-library-podcast
As the British Library exhibition Writing Britain opens, curators Jamie Andrews and Tanya Kirk guide us through the imaginative territories writers have carved out from these British Isles<p>In this week's podcast, we explore the relationship between landscape and literature in the UK. <a href="http://www.bl.uk/writingbritain">The British Library's Writing Britain exhibition</a> opens today, and we take a tour round the books and artworks with curators Jamie Andrews and Tanya Kirk, moving from the moors of the Brontës to JG Ballard's suburbia. We chart the growth of the urban landscape as well, beautifully characterised in Bernard Kops's poem, <a href="http://www.whitemercury.com/literature/whitechapel-library-aldgate-east-by-bernard-kops.html">Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East</a>, and take a sneak peek at the Fay Godwin photographs that inspired the poems in Elmet, Ted Hughes's collection of poems about the Calder Valley in Yorkshire. We finish by dabbling our feet in the UK's water writing, accompanied by the splash and gurgle of Graham Swift's Waterland and Alice Oswald's riverine poem, Dart.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2012/may/11/writers-landscape-british-library-podcast">Continue reading...</a>British LibraryGraham SwiftAlice OswaldFictionBooksCultureFri, 11 May 2012 14:06:39 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2012/may/11/writers-landscape-british-library-podcastPhotograph: Christopher ThomondInspiring vision ... the Calder valley. Photograph: Christopher ThomondPhotograph: Christopher ThomondInspiring vision ... the Calder valley. Photograph: Christopher ThomondPresented by Sarah Crown and produced by Tim Maby2012-05-11T14:06:39ZPaperback Q&A: Graham Swift on Wish You Were Herehttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/20/paperback-q-and-a-graham-swift
The Last Orders author describes the 'stages of ignition' that got his latest novel off the ground<p><strong>How did you come to write </strong><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/data/book/literary-fiction/9780330535830/wish-you-were-here" title=""><strong>Wish You Were Here</strong></a><strong>?</strong></p><p>I think I began with the concrete situation with which the book begins: a man staring from a bedroom window, a loaded shotgun on the bed behind him. I had to discover how he'd reached this extremity, and its outcome. I didn't know the story would include caravans, cattle disease and the war in Iraq – its almost literal "coming home". I seem to write novels that are domestic and undomestic, rooted and uprooted at the same time. In Wish You Were Here, all this is focused in the paradoxical word "repatriation". I felt that as well as telling the story of a man and wife the novel would strongly involve the relationship of brothers. But novels have secondary stages of ignition, on top of whatever unaccountable thrust that first lifts them off. One of these was when I realised the book would be a ghost story.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/20/paperback-q-and-a-graham-swift">Continue reading...</a>Graham SwiftPaperbacksFictionBooksCultureTue, 20 Mar 2012 18:02:28 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/20/paperback-q-and-a-graham-swiftPhotograph: Eamonn Mccabe/Guardian'I didn’t know the story would include caravans, cattle disease and the war in Iraq' … Graham Swift. Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe for the GuardianPhotograph: Eamonn Mccabe/Guardian'I didn’t know the story would include caravans, cattle disease and the war in Iraq' … Graham Swift. Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe for the GuardianGuardian Staff2012-03-20T18:02:28ZWish You Were Here by Graham Swift – reviewhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/12/graham-swift-wish-you-here
This meditation on Englishness echoes but ultimately fails to match Swift's Booker-winning Last Orders<p>Graham Swift has chosen a line from William Blake to serve as the motto for his new novel, <em>Wish You Were Here</em>, but he might just as well have picked the famous opening of Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth": "What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?" Dead cows and dead soldiers feature heavily in the book and there's even a suggestion of those little country pieties, the flowers and the "drawing-down of blinds", by which they are both remembered. Swift has a good eye for the way large stories and small ones intersect and here he has managed to turn a novel about a brief marital spat into a reflection on Englishness and its decline.</p><p>Mad cow and foot-and-mouth disease and the effects on the countryside of second homes play their part, along with the attack on the World Trade Centre, the vague war on terror and the two rather less vague wars that it precipitated, in Iraq and Afghanistan. The immediate story covers just a few days and frames, like his Booker-winning novel <em>Last Orders</em>, a journey to a funeral (of sorts); but the novel spends as much time in the past as in the present.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/12/graham-swift-wish-you-here">Continue reading...</a>FictionBooksCultureGraham SwiftBenjamin MarkovitsSat, 11 Jun 2011 23:05:10 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/12/graham-swift-wish-you-hereBenjamin Markovits2011-06-11T23:05:10ZWish You Were Here by Graham Swift – reviewhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/11/wish-you-were-swift-review
Graham Swift's ninth novel is not for impatient readers<p>The story of a dreadful day of catharsis in the life of a resolutely ordinary man,&nbsp;Graham Swift's ninth novel begins with remembered images of funeral pyres of burning cattle and the collapse of the twin towers. "There is no end to madness," thinks Jack Luxton, sitting alone in his bedroom in a cottage on the Isle of Wight, looking out over the rain-lashed caravan site, now closed for winter, that he has run for the past 10 years with his wife, Ellie. Jack has just returned from the repatriation and funeral of his younger brother Tom, a soldier killed in Iraq, who had left the family many years ago and never kept in touch. Terrible, unrevealed words have passed between Jack and his wife, and she has taken off with the car. Now, with a loaded gun, he awaits her return.</p><p>How has this "smiling host in a joke of a shirt", with his "gormless block of a face", come to this? <em>Wish You Were Here </em>is the slow, repetitive unfolding of Jack's life leading up to this point. A&nbsp;probing but leisurely character study&nbsp;masquerading as a mystery, it is scattered awkwardly with irritating and heavy-handed hints of impending&nbsp;doom, auguring a repeat of the damp squib ending of Swift's last novel,<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/data/book/fiction/9780330450188/tomorrow" title=""> <em>Tomorrow</em></a>.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/11/wish-you-were-swift-review">Continue reading...</a>Graham SwiftFictionBooksCultureFri, 10 Jun 2011 23:13:37 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/11/wish-you-were-swift-reviewPhotograph: PRIllustration by Clifford Harper/agraphia.co.ukPhotograph: PRIllustration by Clifford Harper/agraphia.co.ukCarol Birch2011-06-10T23:13:37ZBook reviews rounduphttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/04/crtitical-eye-book-reviews-roundup
GK Chesterton: A&nbsp;Biography by Ian Ker and Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift<p>"Heroically researched, and sensitive to the shifts and eddies of its hero's intellectual position, <em>GK Chesterton: A&nbsp;Biography</em> is simultaneously an impressive and rather asphyxiating book. It is at once exorbitantly long and yet somehow constricted by the sheer volume of material at the biographer's disposal." <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/gk-chesterton-a-biography-by-ian-ker-2276042.html" title="">The Independent's <strong>DJ&nbsp;Taylor</strong></a><strong> </strong>gave a mixed review to Ian Ker's tome, which, noted <strong>Oliver Kamm </strong>in the Times, "appears to be, surprisingly, the first full-length literary and intellectual biography of one of the most recognisable men of letters of the 1920s and 1930s". But, Kamm continued, as "a defence of Chesterton's claims to literary let alone philosophical eminence, however, the book fails decisively . . . If Ker does not really tackle Chesterton's literary failings, he vastly overstates his hero's political wisdom. Chesterton's politics, where not pernicious, were largely nonsense." According to <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8509157/G-K-Chesterton-ABiography-by-Ian-Ker-review.html" title=""><strong>Robert Douglas-Fairhurst</strong> in the Daily Telegraph</a>, "in one way this new biography by Ian Ker perfectly matches its subject. It is very large. It is also thoroughly researched and so generous in the number and length of its quotations that it sometimes seems on the verge of turning into an anthology. Sadly, in every other way this is a book that punches below its weight"; it "has done what should have been impossible: it makes Chesterton sound boring."</p><p><em>Wish You Were Here</em>, the new novel by Graham Swift, which lays out the fraught history of a farming family, received respectful notices. "Swift is expert at conveying the emotional contours of ordinary lives and embedding them in particular landscapes," wrote <strong>Ruth Scurr </strong>in the Times: "In his novels, the attachment between people and place is always fraught and complex . . . Swift is a melancholy and compassionate writer." For <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n11/tim-parks/beware-remembrance-sunday" title=""><strong>Tim Parks</strong> in the London Review of Books</a>, "One can only admire the patience and resourcefulness with which Swift constructs all his interconnections (the frequent parallel between culled cattle and slaughtered soldiers is another), but the narration is more effective when straightforward . . . Still, the relationships between the main characters are convincing, and they are the core of the story." <a href="http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/book/article-23953977-wish-you-were-here-finds-the-language-of-true-compassion.do" title=""><strong>Nicholas Lezard</strong> in the Evening Standard </a>was most enthusiastic: "The great thing about Swift, then, is the way he takes the elements of melodrama but uses them in a calm, unostentatious and utterly plausible way. In doing so . . . he gets to the heart of people . . . Hardy seemed to relish his characters' suffering. Swift might make his endure, or fail to endure, the&nbsp;most awful things – but in the end, the very end of this extraordinary novel, thank goodness, he treats them with compassion."</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/04/crtitical-eye-book-reviews-roundup">Continue reading...</a>GK ChestertonGraham SwiftBooksCultureFri, 03 Jun 2011 23:09:20 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/04/crtitical-eye-book-reviews-roundupGuardian Staff2011-06-03T23:09:20ZGraham Swift on 'contemporary' novelshttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/04/graham-swift-contemporary-novels
'They are an impossibility'<p>There's no such thing as the contemporary novel. Before I seem the complete reactionary, let me add that I've happily joined in many discussions about "the contemporary novel" where what that usually, unproblematically means is novels that have appeared recently or may appear soon. But the novel that's contemporary in the sense of being wholly "of now" is an impossibility, if only because novels may take years to write, so the "now" with which they begin will be defunct by the time they're finished. Nonetheless, the idea of the novel that's wholly of now persists. There's an undeniable thrill in seeing what's most current in our lives offered back to us in fictional guise, but it soon dates and it's never enough.</p><p>When we read novels of the past we're apt to think that they depict a world contemporary to them – that what is Dickensian about Dickens involved his constantly keeping abreast of his times. In fact his novels often look back a decade or more. <em>War and Peace</em>, was written in the 1860s but set during the Napoleonic wars. Since one of his themes was war, Tolstoy might have chosen the Crimean war of the mid-1850s, of which he had direct experience, and he did write about the Crimea in his book <em>Sebastopol</em>, but that's a work of brilliant reportage. He clearly wanted some distance and he knew the difference between a novel and a brilliant report. When Tolstoy died Proust was beginning a novel-sequence which would take the rest of&nbsp;his life and so was never going to be&nbsp;"of now", and its title proclaims one&nbsp;of the things that the novel as a form is inherently about: the passage of time.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/04/graham-swift-contemporary-novels">Continue reading...</a>Graham SwiftBooksCultureFri, 03 Jun 2011 23:04:38 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/04/graham-swift-contemporary-novelsPhotograph: Daniel Berehulak/Getty ImagesIraq 2006 - the year in which Graham Swift's latest novel is set. Photograph: Daniel Berehulak/Getty ImagesPhotograph: Daniel Berehulak/Getty ImagesIraq 2006 - the year in which Graham Swift's latest novel is set. Photograph: Daniel Berehulak/Getty ImagesGraham Swift2011-06-03T23:04:38ZRichard Francis's top 10 pubs in literature | Top 10shttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/08/richard-francis-top-10-pubs-literature
After setting his latest novel in an English pub, Richard Francis drops in on his favourite literary drinking dens, from the Tabard in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn<p>Richard Francis is the author of nine previous novels and three non-fiction books, and is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University.</p><p>His latest novel, The Old Spring, out this month, tells the story of a day in the life of an English pub. He chooses his top 10 literary drinking dens.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/08/richard-francis-top-10-pubs-literature">Continue reading...</a>Geoffrey ChaucerDaphne du MaurierGraham SwiftBooksCultureFictionThu, 08 Jul 2010 13:37:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/08/richard-francis-top-10-pubs-literaturePhotograph: Adrian Sherratt / Alamy/AlamyPlenty of drink, convivial company, proactive landlord, telling of tales ... The Old Spot in Dursley, Gloucestershire. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt / AlamyPhotograph: Adrian Sherratt / Alamy/AlamyPlenty of drink, convivial company, proactive landlord, telling of tales ... The Old Spot in Dursley, Gloucestershire. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt / AlamyRichard Francis2010-07-08T13:37:00ZReview: Making an Elephant: Writing from Within by Graham Swifthttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/mar/28/making-elephant-graham-swift-review
Graham Swift's first work of non-fiction is tainted by literary back-scratching, finds Hilary Mantel<p>For some writers, an unhappy childhood is their most precious possession. Not so for Graham Swift; all was serene in south Croydon, where he grew up. His grandparents' house in Sydenham was lofty and faintly sinister, but when the child mounted the steep stairs there was the reward, at the top, of an old-fashioned typewriter with "stiff epaulettes of spokes", with which he was allowed to play. He enjoys the geography he was born into; in adult life, after some early hippyish travels, he sees no need to stray far beyond the south London suburbs about whose hidden and lost charms he writes eloquently in one of the short pieces that make up this collection. The finest is the title piece; it is a memoir of his father, who had seen war service in the Fleet Air Arm before settling to a happy marriage and a civil service career. A loving son, Swift recalls his early retirement, his years of contentment and a "quick and cruel" end at 70, after facing his final illness with "workmanlike co-operation". Swift also is workmanlike; the piece has his hallmarks, his delicate attention to the inner life of the "ordinary" man, his understated and thoughtful engagement.</p><p>The rest of the collection is less lustrous. Swift has combed through his archive, no doubt in advance of its recent transfer to the British Library. He has come up with some old interviews, poems, topographical excursions, ruminations on his own career path. Born in 1949, he begins his personal story with an account of that dreaded rite of postwar childhood, the polio inoculation; he extends it, not without effort, into a meditation on fiction. Swift is not a keen researcher, he admits, but research into himself might have paid off; the "pale floret" he retains on his left arm is more likely to be from a smallpox vaccination. </p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/mar/28/making-elephant-graham-swift-review">Continue reading...</a>Graham SwiftBiographyBooksCultureSat, 28 Mar 2009 00:01:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/mar/28/making-elephant-graham-swift-reviewHilary Mantel2009-03-28T00:01:00Z